Using Event Log Timing Information to Assist Process Scenario Discoveries

Event logs contain abundant information, such as activity names, time stamps, activity executors, etc. However, much of existing trace clustering research has been focused on applying activity names to assist process scenarios discovery. In addition, many existing trace clustering algorithms commonly used in the literature, such as k-means clustering approach, require prior knowledge about the number of process scenarios existed in the log, which sometimes are not known aprior. This paper presents a two-phase approach that obtains timing information from event logs and uses the information to assist process scenario discoveries without requiring any prior knowledge about process scenarios. We use five real-life event logs to compare the performance of the proposed two-phase approach for process scenario discoveries with the commonly used k-means clustering approach in terms of model's harmonic mean of the weighted average fitness and precision, i.e., the F1 score. The experiment data shows that (1) the process scenario models obtained with the additional timing information have both higher fitness and precision scores than the models obtained without the timing information; (2) the two-phase approach not only removes the need for prior information related to k, but also results in a comparable F1 score compared to the optimal k-means approach with the optimal k obtained through exhaustive search.